On Tuesday, June 2, 27 fourth-year compulsory secondary education students from the public high school La Romànica (Barberà del Vallès, Catalonia) took part in the workshop Is soil more than just “dirt”?, held in the laboratories of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) as part of the Revir project.

Revir is a programme consisting of a series of hands-on science workshops organized for full-class groups of secondary and upper secondary students.

This workshop is based on four learning scenarios developed by the LOESS project partners, aimed at promoting the acquisition of knowledge about soil health through the use of integrated STEM teaching and learning, implemented via the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) 5E Instructional Model, along with the application of innovative pedagogical approaches.

The four LOESS learning scenarios are Exploring Soil: A Learning across STEM, The Life Beneath Our Feet, SOS! Save Our Soils!, and Soil Detectives.

During the workshop, students were divided into small groups and asked to imagine the soil characteristics — such as color, components, and texture — at three locations on the UAB campus: the Plaça de les Oliveres, a nearby grove, and the edge of the stream. They illustrated their predictions and then collected actual soil samples from those spots. Back in the lab, they observed the samples first with the naked eye and then using a digital magnifying glass, updating their descriptions and drawings based on what they saw.

Once they learned about the main soil components — minerals, organic matter, air, and water — and the interactions between them, they carried out four physical and chemical tests to measure the proportion of each element present in the samples, recording the data in a table. Finally, the students observed a demonstration on how to determine the pH of the different soil samples, conducted by professors Víctor López and Maria Navarro.

The workshop will be held again next week with two groups of 45 first-year compulsory secondary education students from Institut Martí Pous (Barcelona) on Wednesday, June 11 and Friday, June 13, as well as 14 fourth-year compulsory secondary education students from Escola Sagrat Cor de Terrassa on Thursday, June 12.